Death of the Liberal Class (21 page)

I began to understand that art-world “discourses” could not be taken seriously, and I can remember a moment when it became clear to me that avant-garde art was not progressive or humanitarian—that it was, in a political sense, conservative, and was not looking for approval or comprehension from outside its privileged inner circle. I had naïvely believed that the modern art enterprise remained in some way linked to a gradual pull toward decency, a counterpart to various struggles for equality and fairness that were going on outside the world of art. The opposite was true. Tenderness and empathy had been banished from “important” art. They were not good for business. Today’s sanctified works of art are essentially financial vehicles—stripped of burdensome humanity.

 

Nothing is wrong with these things, of course, unless they are piled up as in a blockade to make passage of any useful images or ideas very difficult. What disheartens me when I enter the contemporary wing of the Museum of Modern Art, although it could be any contemporary wing, anywhere, since there is now only one message, which is that a once-vital avenue of human connection is clogged with things that rebuke the notion of connection. I watch people wandering through these vast rooms looking somewhat glazed, half asleep—many of them, no doubt, suspecting that they are not clever enough or sufficiently educated to receive the blessing of high art. It saddens me that they came to experience art in good faith, believing that through it they might become uplifted, sensitized to life, as they would be if they had stayed home and read a good contemporary novel. Museum-goers are being deceived about the breadth of contemporary art and what it could offer them.

 

Maybe we all have to do that. I have to disregard the hierarchies of the art world to make space for artists in all fields who give me something authentic and who occasionally change my life. Some of these artists are well known. Others are like secrets completely invisible to those we call “art professionals.” Among the artists in what I call “my working history of art” are the Czech animator and sculptor Jan Švankmajer, the Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù, the Spanish painters Antonio López García and Cristóbal Toral, the French sculptors Louis Pons and Jacques Clavé, and the Swiss artist of “poetic machines,” Paul Gugelmann. Then there are the Germans: Adolph Menzel, Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, and especially Käthe Kollwitz. I try to spread the word about these people rather than speaking negatively about the enormous mass of well-funded contemporary art that doesn’t help.

 

It’s the mainstream media. When the corporate media chooses to ignore serious political art, it marginalizes it. Millions of people who might see, read, hear that art, don’t. Their questions, ideas, feelings are not then validated by witnessing them portrayed accurately in art. Art tells many people it’s OK to think and feel unpopular things. Without that assurance, people are often isolated with their own perception of reality and will retreat to official conformity and the comfort of patriotism, even when it betrays the ideals it is meant to support.

 

That music about civil rights and the illegitimacy of the Vietnam War was everywhere. The corporate media had not yet learned that simply by not playing that music they could severely limit the spread of ideas. Millions of young people were radicalized to act for political causes, not by reading essays and taking courses, but by the spurring of art. Art told them their consciences were right. They could trust Bob Dylan and not LBJ or Nixon. Try to imagine the civil-rights or the antiwar movements without the music.

 

If their intent was to build a consensus good for profit, and that profit derived from war, exploitation, and imperialism, all they had to do was
not
report on or play art that carried a message of peace and resistance. It’s not censorship. The artists are free to speak and produce. But not many people will know about it. And, because the corporate media, our sanctified free press, is now clearly part of the mechanism of propaganda for the military-industrial-congressional complex, artists have to attack the press as much as the war profiteers and elected liars, and thus have even less likelihood of being reported on. The media hates to have its biases exposed.

 

Political art may call us to argue, be divisive, when we should be meditating. Shouldn’t art be a refuge, a place for persistent reflection on the finer things? It is my belief that art should be, and can be, many things. If it is about beauty, it must also be about truth, even when that truth is ugly and anathema to the beautiful and powerful. A beautiful still life is never, in a certain sense, irrelevant. But if the survival of human life is in jeopardy, maybe it’s important that some artists explore why with all of the urgency and truth that they can bring to bear.

 

We know them through their art, which is what endures and communicates the given psyche of the people at that time. When we look at art, we realize that the ideas we’ve taken from it define Western civilization, yet we devalue the place of the artist. We don’t see what they do as legitimate, or even hard work. Take the art work of South African artist William Kentridge. He lived and created works during the apartheid years. He had this ability to shift and pivot the world at a time when no one wanted to confront or question power. So often artists are the ones who go into difficult situations. Doctors and others go into difficult situations in communities, too, but they don’t make representations of those situations that transform how people see the world. All I’m saying is that I want artists to feel they could take leadership in the world, not that their work will simply be relegated to what we call “the art world.”
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To evoke from people an understanding of what they really want out of their lives or to debate with them stoic, Christian, and humanist ways of living, is pretty much a clear-cut education of values. But to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills and an education of values. It includes a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of one’s self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking; and with others, which we call debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.